User experience or customer experience is at the heart of every digital development. Companies and businesses are starting to take UX/CX more seriously due to the fact that they matter. The customers themselves are more sensitive to good experience and are more likely to follow through with an action (i.e. a purchase) when they are happy.
Unfortunately, there is no predetermined set of rules when it comes to customer experience. Every customer has different expectations. There are a lot of other factors to consider before working on your site’s customer experience too. These tips we are about to cover in this article will help you understand better what the customers really expect in 2018.
Start with the Basics
Who are your target customers? This is the most basic question you need to answer before moving on to other parts of the process. A complete understanding of the target customers is what enables you to fine-tune every part of the site to suit them.
It is much easier to understand existing customers. You are already interacting with them through your store and social media pages, so you know the general expectations of the customers or target customers. You just have to dig deeper to learn about the important insights.
For a new online business, competitor research and market research are the answers. I know a lot of online entrepreneurs don’t even do market research for various reasons. The information you get in return is actually more valuable than the cost of conducting thorough research on the market.
Go Through the Journey
Customer experience is a holistic thing. Any disruption – at any point of the journey – will only ruin the whole CX and lower your conversion rate. To do a complete and equally-holistic improvement of the experience, you need to follow every step of your customers.
Start with trying to search for your products or services. Use keywords that you would normally use when searching for other products (leave your brand name or specific product name out of the search until later in the process). Can you find your site?
Continue by hitting the search result that leads to your site and following through with a purchase. This is what the customers experience when they try to purchase your product. After two or three passes, you will find plenty of things to improve.
Keep It Simple
Simplify! This needs to be your focus at every part of the process. Forget about adding an extra step to get customers to sign up for a newsletter or adding fields to the checkout form. You want to make money online, and the way you do that is by keeping your customers extremely happy.
Simplify the entire journey as much as you can. If the current checkout process has three steps, make it so that customers can complete their purchases in two. If customers cannot pay using credit cards, figure out a way to add this popular payment option to your site.
With small tweaks and little steps, you will end up with a site that offers stunning customer experience from start to finish. This is a continuous process, so repeat the process and continue observing your customers to know exactly what they really want.
